In 2018, the chief curator at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Khwezi Gule, curated, “All Your Faves are Problematic”, an exhibition intended to provoke different ways of thinking about South African modern and contemporary art. The press release notes: For the most part, South African modern and contemporary art is treated with some kind of reverence…
From ‘Don’t Look Up’ to ‘The Menu’, satires seem to be dominating the current box office. Films and shows are commenting on class divisions, environmental catastrophes and political crises more and more. We’ve also witnessed a rise in different forms of satire, from Saturday Night Live sketches to talk shows such as Last Week Tonight…
In 2021, Gwede Mantashe called the environmental activism against Shell’s attempts to blast the Wild Coast looking for oil, “apartheid”, a “colonialism of a special type”. The chance to strike black gold in the Eastern Cape presented an opportunity for economic prosperity for a country in desperate need of it and according to our Minister…
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the same paradigm of stories and archetypes of heroes hitting the big screen. With the same storylines and sometimes even the same predictable dialogue, Hollywood studio films all feel derivative right now. One of the few types of films we keep seeing, again and again, is the biopic….
There is a thin line between life and how it imitates art. In an essay titled ‘The Decay of Lying’, 1889, Oscar Wilde describes it vividly, expressing the notion of events in the real world being inspired by creative work. Wilde offers insight, yet, what remains, still, is the inquisition: how do we use artistic…
Once in a while, it is a good idea to take stock of where we are. It’s so easy to become desensitised to the political realities around us. It becomes like a buzzing in the ear that the body acclimates to, muffled in the cacophony of noises. For example, to state that corruption is a…
I’ve been thinking a lot about space recently. Not the endless cosmos, the scope and size of which seem unfathomable. No, I talk here of space in a far smaller, if not more pertinent sense – the spaces in which we move, we choose to occupy and find comfort in. Here, we come across a…
We need difficult women like damn — with urgency. We need difficult women like unlearning that love is always hard laboured for. Like remembering that the stakes were always high — for the stakes were always you. We need difficult women like breaking generational curses. We need difficult women like remembering we’ve always mattered. Like…
The Bolanle Austen-Peters production Collision Course begins like an action film. The shaky, handheld camerawork over the shoulder of the protagonist includes the viewer in the kidnapping that takes place in the opening scene. Olumide Johnson is ripped out of his car by the burly men of the rogue police unit, TARS. He is taken…
“The global cosmetic surgery and procedure market size was valued at USD 63.4 billion in 2021 and is projected to exhibit a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6% from 2022 to 2030.” From grandviewresearch.com The cosmetic surgery industry has never been bigger than it is today — and though continuously debated, millions and millions…
Kylie Jenner posted a black and white image of herself and her partner Travis Scott, standing between two private planes with the caption: “you wanna take mine or yours?” This quickly sparked debate. The heat of the scandal burned hotter when an automated Twitter account that tweets and tracks the flights that celebrities take according…
Trigger warning: fatphobia, suicide ideation, and eating disorders. I remember being 11 years old and not necessarily being concerned with my relatives and why they always mentioned my weight. I was more focused on why that was such a flaw and why it didn’t make me good enough — good enough like my slimmer cousins…
